The demon rounded the tattler of a building; across from them and paused. Feeders crowded forward and hovered close. The older of the two boys came to ibis feet and stood tasking out into the dark. The other two crouched guardedly to either side. There was only one way in or out of their shelter. The demon had them trapped..
It advanced slowly inter the light, showing itself gradually, letting them see what it was. Fear showed on their faces and in their eyes. Frantic exclamations escaped their lips-low, muttered curses that sounded like prayers. The demon was filled with joy.
The older boy produced a long-bladed knife. `Get away!' he warned, and swore violently at the demon, The demon came forward anyway, the feeders trailing in its wake. The girl and the younger boy shrank from it in terror. The girl was already crying. Neither would challenge it; the demon could tell from what it saw in their eyes. Only the older boy would make a stand. The demon's tongue licked out across its hooked teeth, and its jaws snapped hungrily at the air.
The demon crept through the doorway in a crouch, eyes fixed on the knife. All three of its intended victims retreated toward the back wall of the room. Foolish choice, the demon thought. They had let it inside, let it block their only escape.
Then the younger boy wheeled away in a flurry of arms and legs and threw himself toward one of the broken windows, intent on breaking free that way. But the demon was too quick. It lunged sideways and caught the unfortunate boy in a single bound. It dragged him to the earthen floor, closed its massive jaws on his neck as he screamed and thrashed frantically, and crushed the life from him with a single snap.
The boy fell back lifelessly. Feeders piled onto the body, tearing at it. The demon swung its bloodied muzzle toward the other two, showing all its teeth. The girl was screaming now, and the older boy was cursing and shouting and brandishing the knife more as a talisman than as a weapon. They might have made a run for the open doorway while the demon was engaged in killing their companion, out they: had failed to do so. Or even to try. The girl was an her knees with her arms about her head, keening. The older boy was ,standing his ground, but it seemed to the demon that he was doing so because he could not bring himself to move.
The demon advanced on the older boy, stiff-legged, alert. When it was dose enough, it waited until the boy lunged with the knife, then hurled itself under the gleaming blade, jaws dosing an the hand that wielded it. Bones crunched and muscles tore, and the boy screamed in pain. The demon knocked the boy backward against the wall and tore out his throat while he was still staring at his ruined hand.
Feeders sprang out of the darkness in knots of black shadow, falling on the dying boy, lapping up the life that drained away from him, feeding on the raw feelings of terror and despair and pain.
The girl had begun to crawl toward the open door, a futile attempt to get free. The demon moved quickly to intercept her. She crouched before it in a shivering heap, her arms clasped over her head, her eyes closed. She was crying and screaming and begging Don't, please, don't, please, don't-over and over again- The demon studied her for a moment, intrigued by the way the madness had enveloped her. It was no longer in a hurry, its hunger appeased with the killing of the boys. It felt languorous and sleepy. It watched the girl through lidded eyes. There were feeders crawling all over her, savoring the emotions she expended, licking them up anxiously. Perhaps she could feel them, perhaps even see them by now, with death so dose. Perhaps she sensed what death held in store far her. The demon wondered.
Then it closed its jaws almost tenderly about the back of the girl's exposed white neck and crushed the slender stalk to pulp.
Abruptly, the screams faded to silence. Nest froze, staring into the mist and gloom, into the faint pools of streetlight, listening. She couldn`t hear a thing.
Ariel drifted dose. The tatterdemalion hung suspended an the air, spectral, barely a presence at all. 'It is over'
Nest blinked. Over. So quickly. Her mind spun. 'What was it?' she asked quietly.
'A creature of the Void.'
Nest stared into the tatterdemalion's eyes and knew exactly which creature. She felt a chill sweep through her body and settle in her throat. A demon.' she whispered.
'Its stink is in the air,' Aril said.
'What was it hunting?'
'The humans who live under the streets.'
Homeless, people. Nest dosed her eyes in despair. Could she have helped them, if she had been quicker, if she had known where to go, if she had summoned her magic? If, If, If. She took a deep breath. She wondered suddenly if these killings were connected in same wan with john Ross. Was this monster hunting for him, as well? Mustn't it be, if it was here, so close to where he was working?
`We have to go,' said Ariel. Her childlike voice was a ripple of breeze in the silence. `It isn't safe for us to remain here:
Because it might come for us next, Nest thought. She stood her ground a moment longer, tempted to invite it to try, riddled with anger and disgust. But staying would be foolish. Demons were too strong far her. She had learned that lesson from her father five nears earlier.
She began to walk, Ariel skimming the air beside her, moving toward the hotel once more. She had been searching the shadows for feeders the entire time they had walked, a habit she would never break, but she hadn't seen any. Now she understood why. They were all underground with the demon, drinking in the detritus of its kills.
She stared off into the night, down the darkened corridors of
side streets and alleyways, into blackened doorways and landings, and along shadowy eaves and overhangs. It isn't safe for us to remain here, Ariel had said, urging her to move quickly away, to flee.
Maybe so, she thought. Not with a demon present. But demons seemed to be everywhere in her life. Demons and dark magic, the workings of the Maid.
It isn't safe for us here.
But maybe it was no longer safe anywhere.
Tuesday October 30th
CHAPTER 11
When Nest Freemark awoke the following morning, the sun was streaming so brightly through her window that she thought she must have overslept. The dock radio she had set the night before was playing softly, which meant that the alarm had gone off and she leaned over quickly to check the time. But it was only nine o'clock, the hour .she had chosen for her wake-up, so she was right on schedule. She glanced over at the window, and she realized that the reason it was so bright was that she had forgotten to draw the blinds.
She laid her head back on her Pillow sleepily for a moment, still disoriented from her sudden .awakening. She could hear the sounds of traffic on the street below, brash and jarring, but her room was a bright cocoon of silence and warmth. She had read somewhere that it rained a lot in Seattle, but apparently that wasn't going to be the case today,
She closed her eyes and then opened them again, searching her mind. Last night's memories of her walk into Pioneer Square seemed distant and vague, almost as if they were part of a dream. She stared at the ceiling and forced herself to remember. Walking alone with Ariel. Hearing the screams. Feeling frightened and helpless. Hearing Ariel's words.
Something hunts.
A demon, - she had replied.
She rose and walled to the window and looked down at the street. Same street as last night, only brighter and more populated in the daylight. She watched the people and cars for a few minutes, organizing her scattered thoughts and gathering up the shards of confusion and uncertainty that littered her mind. Then she went into the bathroom and showered. She stood beneath the hot stream of water for a long time, eves closed, thinking. She was a long way from home, and she was still uncertain of her purpose in coming to find John Ross. She wished she had a better idea of what she was going to do when she found him. She wished she knew what she was going to say. She wished she were better prepared.
She toweled dry and dressed, thinking once again of the demon. She would tell Ross of last night; she knew that much, at least. She would tell him of the Lady's concern, of her warning to
him. She would try to convince him of his danger. But what else could she do? What did she really know about all this, after all? She knew what Ariel had told her, but she couldn't say for certain that it was the truth. If Pick's response was any measure of things, it probably wasn't. The truth wasn't something you got whole cloth from the Word anyway; it came in bits and pieces, riddles and questions, and self-examination and deductive reasoning that, if you were lucky, eventually led to some sort of revelation. She had learned that much from her father. The truth wasn't simple; it was complex. Worse, it wasn't easily decipherable, and it was often difficult to accept.
She sighed, looking about the room, as if the answer to her dilemma might be hidden there. It wasn't, of course. There were no answers here; the answers all lay with John Ross.
She went down to the lobby for her breakfast, pausing to stare out through large plate-glass doors at the busy city streets. Although the day was bright and sunny, people out walking were bundled up in coats and scarves, so she knew it must be cold. She continued on to the dining room and ate alone at a table near the back, sipping at her coffee and nibbling on her toast and scrambled eggs as she formulated her plan for the day.
She would have preferred to talk things over with Ariel, but there was no sign of the tatterdemalion. Nor was there likely to be.
She remembered Ariel saying to her last night, just before she went back into the hotel, 'Don't worry. I'll be close to you. You wont see me, but I'll be there when you need me'
Reassuring, but not particularly satisfactory. It made her wish Pick was with her. Pick would have appeared whether she needed him or not. Pick would have talked everything over with her. She still missed him. She found herself comparing the sylvan and the tatterdemalion and decided that, given the choice, she still preferred Pick's incessant chatter to Ariel's wraithlike presence.
She tried to remember the rest of what Pick had told her about tatterdemalions. It wasn't much. Like sylvans they were born fully formed, but unlike sy(vans they lived only a short time and didn't age. Both were forest creatures, but sylvans never went beyond the territory for which they were given responsibility, while tatterdemalions rode everywhere on the back of the wind and went all over the world. Sylvans worked at managing the magic, at its practical application, at keeping the balance in check. Tatterdemalions did none of that, eared nothing for the magic, were as insubstantial in their work as they were in their forms. They served the Word, but their service was less carefully defined and more subject to change than that of sylvans. Tatterdemalions were like ghosts.
Nest finished the last of her orange juice and stood up. Tatterdemalions were strange, even as fairy creatures went. She tried to imagine what it must be like to be Ariel, to have lived without experiencing a childhood anal with no expectation of ever becoming an adult, to know you would be alive only a short time and then be gone again. She supposed the concept of time was a relative one, and some creatures had no concept of time at all. Maybe that was the way it was with tatterdemalions. But what would it be like to live your entire life with the memories of dead ,children, of lives come and gone before your own, to have only their memories and none of your own?
She gave it up. She would never be able to put herself in Ariel's place, not even in the most abstract sense, because she had no reference point to help her gam any real insight. They were as different as night and day. And yet they both served the Word, and they were both, in some sense, creatures of magic.
Nest stopped thinking about it, went back to her room, brushed her teeth, put on her heavy windbreaker and scarf, and went out to greet the day.
She had looked up the address to Fresh Start and consulted a map of Pioneer Square, so she pretty much knew where she was going. The map was tucked in her pocket for ready reference. She walked down First Avenue, retracing her steps from the night before, until she reached the triangular open space where she had heard the death screams of the demons victims. She stood in the center of the little concrete park and looked around, No one acted as if anyone had died. No one seemed to think anything was amiss. People came and went along the walk-workers., shoppers, and tourists. A few sad-looking homeless people sat with their backs to the walls of buildings fronting the street, holding out handlettered cardboard signs and worn paper cups as they begged for a few coins. The former mostly ignored the latter, looking elsewhere as they passed, engaging in conversations that kept their eyes averted, acting as if they didn't see. In a way, she supposed, they didn't. She thought that was an accurate indicator of how the world worked, that people frequently managed to find ways of ignoring what troubled them. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe that was how the demon got away with killing homeless people; everyone was ignoring them anyway; so when a few disappeared, no one even noticed.
Maybe that was the cause that John loss had taken up in joining forces with Simon Lawrence. Maybe that was his passion now that he was no longer a Knight of the Word. The thought appealed to her.
She walked on, doing her best to turn away from the gusts of cold wind that blew at her. Winter was corning; she didn't like to think of her world turning to ice and snow and temperature drops and wind-chill factors. She didn't like thinking of everything turning white and gray and mud-streaked. She glanced bark at the people begging. How much worse it would be far them.
At the corner of Main, she turned east and walked through a broad open space that was marked on her map as Occidental Park. It wasn't much of a park, she thought. Cobblestones and concrete steps, with a few shade trees planted in squares of open earth, a scattering of bushes, a few scary totem pales, same benches, and a strange steel and Plexiglas pavilion. Clusters of what looked to be homeless were gathered here, many of them Native Americans, and a couple of police officers on bicycles. She followed the sidewalk east and found herself at the entrance to an odd little enclosure formed of brick walls and iron fencing with a sign that identified it as Waterfall Park. The space was flied with small trees, vines, and tables and chairs, and was backed by a thunderous man-made waterfall that cascaded into a narrow catchment over massive rocks stacked up against the wall of the building it attached to.
She glanced back at Occidental Park, then into Waterfall Park once again. The parks here weren't much like the parks she was familiar with, and nothing like Sinnissippi Park, but she supposed you made do with what you had.
She crossed Second Avenue and began to read the numbers on the buildings. There was no sign identifying Fresh Start, but she found the building number easily enough and went through the front door.
Once inside, she found herself in a lobby that was mostly empty. .A heavyset black woman sat at a desk facing the door, engaged in writing something on a clipboard, and a Hispanic woman sat holding her baby on one of a cluster of folding chairs that lined the windowless walls of the room. Behind the black woman and her desk, a hallway led to what looked like an elevator.
Almost immediately Nest experienced an odd feeling of uneasiness. She glanced around automatically in an effort to locate its source, but there was nothing to see.
Shrugging it off, she walked up to the desk and stopped. The black woman didn-t look up. `Can I help you., young lady?'
`I'm looking for John Ross,' Nest told her. `Does he work here?'
The black ladys eves lifted, and she have Nest a careful once-over. `He does, but he's not here right now. Would you like to wait for him? He shouldn't be gone long'
Nest nodded. `Thanks: She looked around at the empty seats, deciding where to sit.
`What's your name, young lady?' The black woman regained her attention.
`Nest Freemark'
`Nest. Now, that's an unusual name. Nest. Very different. I like it. Wish I had a different name like that. I'm Dells, Nest. Della Jerkins'
She stuck out her hand and Nest shook it. The handshake was firm and businesslike, but warm, too. `Nice to meet you' Nest said.
`Nice to meet you, too,' Della said, and smiled now. `I work intake here at the center
. Been at it from the start. How do you know John? Isn't anyone ever came in before that knows John. I was beginning to think he didn't have a life before he came here. I was beginning to think he was one of those pod people.' She laughed.
Nest grinned. `Well, I don't know him very well. He was a friend of my mother's: She shaded the truth deliberately, unwilling to give anything away she didn't have to. `I was in town, and I thought I ought to stop in and say hello'
Della nodded. `Well, how about that? John was a friend of your mother's. John doesn't talk much about his past life with us.
A Knight of the Word Page 13
